“There was a rotating security camera on the back of the Pettigrew’s house.”

“Rich folks and their toys,” I said.

“Tape’s dark but it shows a man leaving the pool the night Mr. Pettigrew died.”

“Do I care?”

“Someone held Mr. Pettigrew under the water.”

“You hear if they’re gonna re-open the mill?”

It went on and on, but they had nothing against me.

*

I called again.

“Babe, the police pulled me in.”

“They’re questioning everybody from work.”

“What’s this about a backyard camera?”

“Johnston had just installed it,” she said. “I didn’t even know.”

“I need you bad.”

“I can almost taste you, too,” she said. “But patience.”

Nah, not for me.

I shadowed her. To a mall, the wake, the graveyard.

It was the day after the funeral when she met this other creep. Outside of the fancy threads, he wasn’t so different than me. He got takeout and they shot over to his pad. They were up there for hours.

*

The easy thing would have been to snuff her. But she was growing that thing inside her. Maybe it was mine. I wouldn’t erase my heir to the Pettigrew accounts.

I waited outside her new creep’s love nest. When he was alone, I knocked on his door. .38 Special low. He answered. I backed him inside.

“We know you’ve been stalking Mrs. Pettigrew,” he said. “She feared for her safety, having the camera installed on her grounds for protection.”

“Who are you?”

A cop, he said. I had been under surveillance since I had been brought into the station.

“We watched you follow her to the mall. You were outside the funeral home and cemetery. Mrs. Pettigrew is convinced her stalker drowned her husband so he could then be with her. We pretended she was seeing me, trying to lure you out.”

I lowered the barrel. “We were having an affair,” I said.

“You’re delusional.”

“She’s carrying my child.”

“She fainted last week during an interview. I went to the hospital with her. Neither she nor her doctors mentioned she was pregnant.”

As he said it, I heard feet rushing up the stairs. Sirens roared from the road.

“The apartment is surrounded.”

I went to deadbolt the door. The cop rushed me. My finger squeezed the trigger.

*

There. It’s all down. The truth. Not the infamy of Mrs. Pettigrew.

This—my suicide note.

BIO: Phil, aka philbeloinjr.blogspot.com, loves femme fatales so much, he married one. He has new stories at The Flash Fiction Offensive and Pulp Metal Magazine.